Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations eBook

Babylonia and Assyria were both administered by a
bureaucracy, but whereas in Assyria the bureaucracy
was military, in Babylonia it was theocratic.
The high-priest was the equal and the director of the
king, and the king himself was a priest, and the adopted
child of Bel. In Assyria, on the contrary, the
arbitrary power of the monarch was practically unchecked.
Under him was the Turtannu or Tartan, the commander-in-chief,
who commanded the army in the absence of the king.
The Rab-saki, Rab-shakeh, or vizier, who ranked a little
below him, was the head of the civil officials; besides
him we hear of the Rab-sa-resi or Rabsaris, “the
chief of the princes,” the Rab-mugi or Rab-Mag,
“the court physician,” and an endless
number of other officers. The governors of provinces
were selected from among the higher aristocracy, who
alone had the privilege of sharing with the king the
office of limmu, or eponymous archon after
whom the year was named. Most of these officers
seem to have been confined to Assyria; we do not hear
of them in the southern kingdom of Babylonia.
There, however, from an early period royal judges
had been appointed, who went on circuit and sat under
a president. Sometimes as many as four or six
of them sat on a case, and subscribed their names
to the verdict.

The main attention of the Assyrian government was
devoted to the army, which was kept in the highest
possible state of efficiency. It was recruited
from the free peasantry of the country—­a
fact which, while it explains the excellence of the
Assyrian veterans, also shows why it was that the
empire fell as soon as constant wars had exhausted
the native population. Improvements were made
in it from time to time; thus, cavalry came to supersede
the use of chariots, and the weapons and armour of
the troops were changed and improved. Engineers
and sappers accompanied it, cutting down the forests
and making roads as it marched, and the commissariat
was carefully attended to. The royal tent was
arranged like a house, and one of its rooms was fitted
up as a kitchen, where the food was prepared as in
the palace of Nineveh. In Babylonia it was the
fleet rather than the army which was the object of
concern, though under Nebuchadrezzar and his successors
the army also became an important engine of war.
But, unlike the Assyrians, the Babylonians had been
from the first a water-faring people, and the ship
of war floated on the Euphrates by the side of the
merchant vessel and the state barge of the king.

Such then were the kingdoms of Babylonia and Assyria.
Each exercised an influence on the Israelites and
their neighbours, though in a different way and with
different results. The influence of Assyria was
ephemeral. It represented the meteor-like rise
of a great military power, which crushed all opposition,
and introduced among mankind the new idea of a centralised
world-empire. It destroyed the northern kingdom
of Samaria, and made Palestine once more what it had
been in pre-Mosaic days, the battle-ground between
the nations of the Nile and the Tigris. On the
inner life of western Asia it left no impression.